Recitation Exercise 4: Your Ecological Footprint
Student name:___________________________
Student #:___________________________
TA name:___________________________
No matter how you feel about environmental issues and threats, the simple fact is that each of our lifestyles and consumption patterns does rely on natural resources and production systems that transform nature into consumer products, as well as create waste and pollution. One concept that has evolved to assess this impact is called the "ecological footprint": the volume of land and resources appropriated to support a person, a population, a city, country, etc. The concept developed out of the earlier, simpler formula: I = PAT, where human Impact on the earth is a factor of Population, Affluence (a surrogate for consumption) and Technology (a measure of how that consumption is met).
To get a feel for the way that individual and collective consumption affects land and resources, calculate your ecological footprint. Please be aware that these calculations are used often as a critical reflection of human consumption. We make efforts in this class to examine human use of the earth as neutrally as possible, but we ask you to be open to this exercise as one way of thinking about our relationship to nature. Feel free to criticize this approach in response to the discussion questions listed below.
Go to:
http://www.earthday.net/footprint/index.asp
Or:
http://www.lead.org/leadnet/footprint/intro.htm
(circle the one you used or find another of the many web-based calculators and provide its address—the government of New Zealand offers one at:
http://www.environment.govt.nz/footprint/personal.html, but you need to answer questions in new Zealand dollars! and Toronto offers this site: http://www.rco.on.ca/ecofootprint.html).Calculate your ecological footprint, and write it below (if you prefer another footprint calculated, use it and give us it web address, and be sure to specify the units it uses to express your footprint). Then, recalculate your footprint with changes in lifestyle and consumption to determine which three changes would bring about the largest reduction in footprint (e.g., fly less than 10 hours a year).
Ecological footprint: ________ (what units?)
Changes that most reduce this footprint:
1.
2.
3.
Recitation Discussion topics: Are students a different class in terms of footprint? Do you do anything specifically to reduce your environmental impact? Do you think that education, awareness, and/or policy and laws are effective at obtaining changes in impacts? What weaknesses do you see in this approach to assessing the human impact on environment?